Monday, January 15, 2007

Save the "Net" Petition

If you have had a look at the videos here and you want to send a message to your local Federal member of Parliament in Australia then head on over to this site and locate your electorate, copy the text below and paste it in to the email to your Member of Parliament expressing your outrage at the thought that the internet is anything else then a common carrier...

---Petition for Internet Neutrality

Dear Insert Member of parliament Name here

Parliament must act now to preserve a free and open Internet.

Major players in the ISP and Telecommunications arena's both domestic and foreign are trying to control and limit the type, amount or quality of the internet traffic routed over their networks. This can not be allowed to happen, the internet is not the property of the "carriers" they only carry the data, they own this data flow as much as they own the voice on the end of a telephone.

They are "Common Carriers" and as such should not be allowed to control the type, amount or quality of the internet traffic they are routing.

The majority of the content on the internet is user created with sites like myspace.com, youtube.com and blogger.com being created not by a team of Managers and staff but by the people who use the internet, not for work but for entertainment.

The internet must stay neutral, the change is already happening even here in Australia, for example a pastime of many Australian males is the V8 supercars. The telemetry data from the cars is available on the internet but the caveat..

You have to be a Bigpond customer.

I don't just mean you have to sign up to the Bigpond/V8 site and pay a fee, you have to be a telstra bigpond Broadband customer to access the telemetry. I am not saying that premium services need be free, I am more then happy to pay for the V8's for instance but I shouldn't have to change the "common carrier" I subscribe to just to access content.